I dreamed that I was quarreling with my mother again. I was shaking with anger and screaming at the top of my lungs. After I woke up, I still felt uncontrollable heart palpitations, as if my whole body was floating in mid-air. I still wanted to yell, but when I woke up I completely forgot what I was going to yell. My family is not harmonious and we spend a lot of time arguing. If I were to be judged, I was also unfilial because conversations with my mother would often turn into shouting and I would sometimes throw things and bang my fists against walls. One time, I was in a rental house near my high school. My parents were both there. My mother kept talking to me. As she was talking, I turned over the dining table. Then my dad also started scolding me. I ran to the kitchen and wanted to jump off the 18th floor. As soon as I touched the window sill, my dad, who reacted quickly, hugged my leg.
My parents are different from what many people call their parents. From a young age, my parents treated me as a human being. As I grow older, I feel more and more that my parents don't have any specific expectations for me, as long as I live. They only have the most universal requirements for me, such as being kind to others and not committing crimes. When I talked to my parents since I was a child, I would discuss issues and communicate as if we were two people, rather than as many people say, only my parents have the final say. My parents also give me a lot of company.
Moreover, I don't care about issues such as getting married and having children, buying a house or a car, or having a stable job, which are all talked about now. Because social values kidnap a person, most of them are embodied by his parents. If parents don't care about other people's opinions, then they almost don't have to think about those issues anymore.
I write this not to say that my family is superior to others. What I want to express is my confusion. Because the various conflicts between other people and their parents that I learned from the outside world could not remind me why I kept quarreling with my mother.
In my memory, the content of the quarrel between my mother and I is completely blank. I only remember the sounds, looks, movements, and smells, but I can't remember the words we spoke at all. It's like in my memory, my quarrels with my mother always consisted of shouting out various meanings without any specific content. It was as if I were a hard drive and my complete memory of text-formatted files was extracted and completely deleted.
I never take the initiative to recall the quarrels between my mother and I. It wasn't until I fell in love again in 2021 that I gradually stopped quarreling with my mother. But I occasionally have dreams about quarreling with my mother, which reminds me of this feeling. I felt that I should have known what I was shouting in my dream, and I also knew what my mother was shouting. But once I wake up, I will immediately forget it, only the anxiety keeps aftershocks.
Actually, I talked about this problem with my mother, and she said it was because I didn't do my homework, got into fights, or something like that. But I don't remember it. But I just don't remember it anymore. I spent so much time and energy on quarreling with my mother, hurting each other, and worked hard for it. But now I have completely forgotten all the content, and there is no clue to associate it with the memory. This is amazing. I feel helpless about my memory.
Besides, I feel guilty. I forgot all the arguments I had with my mother. But I remember everything else. I remember my words hurting my mother. Although I also remember that my mother once hurt me.
I often fantasize about being a superman, and subconsciously I also ask myself to be a superman. I feel painful about all the qualities in myself that I am not satisfied with. I feel painful about all the things I have done that I am not satisfied with. I feel that this should not be done and I must change. I regard becoming my ideal image as my pursuit. In my ideal life, I am a superman. I never feel sorry for myself, never make meaningless memories, live in the present in a real sense, act for others and myself every moment, and never consider myself more than I consider others. And his eyes are as bright as a torch, able to distinguish good from evil. Although there is no great goal, we have been working hard for everyone's life and the progress of civilization. Wait, wait, etc., there are many such requests.
This shows that I should have symptoms of obsessive-compulsive and paranoid symptoms.
I tend to be pretentious, which is all too common. I would like to think that I am different from other people. I would like to think that I have great diseases and wonderful thoughts, and I keep telling myself this. Now, I've come to realize that there's nothing special about me.
I gradually realized that my current state may be regarded as strange simply because I have always felt that I have been wronged, and I have no way to resolve it, and I am slowly suffocating. There is no sense of independence from the world in my past fantasies. Maybe it's the so-called youthful confusion that everyone experiences when they're young, maybe it's also Daiyu's sentimentality, maybe it's the superposition of various factors that lead to some symptoms of mental illness in me, such as the obsessive-compulsive symptoms that require me to be a superman, etc. This is a normal reaction of an ordinary living body after encountering certain pathogens. This does not mean that I am an immortal who suffers misunderstanding and ostracism from the world, as I thought before.
I wrote something similar to what I had read countless times in marketing accounts. The marketing account is to add emotional packaging to simple and common problems to spread the word through emotions.
I'm unemployed now. I think about my life sometimes. If my mental state could be treated and managed scientifically from an early age, I might have a completely different life. I may not have regarded painting as my only outlet since I was a child. Maybe I relied on my dad to work in his company as a worker. Maybe I studied mechanics in college and got a graduate degree in school. Maybe I have opened a small restaurant at home. Of course, this is not necessarily happier than now, just very different.
The place where I lived when I was a child was the family building of a state-owned factory. This community is the thing that makes me happy in my memories. The security here is surprisingly good, and there have never been any incidents. There are many idle old people hanging out downstairs. They even shoveled a piece of the public lawn below their respective buildings to grow vegetables. The workers were not as tired as today's workers. After get off work, the male workers played cards and ball in the community, while the female workers did not stay in the community and went shopping outside. Kids like me were running around in the entire area of the family building. Nowadays, there are a lot fewer elderly people, workers and children in the community. It is probably because our society has become more civilized, creating a quiet and harmonious urban landscape.
There was an old lady in the building next door who planted a cherry tree on the lawn. After it produced cherries, I often went to steal them with my classmates. When she saw it, she would run out and curse. She also raised chickens in the enclosure downstairs. I beat her chickens, and then she came to my house to argue with my mother.
Among the children running around in the community, L was very noisy. When she was very young, she said that she liked a very honest little boy and fell in love with him. They broke up not long after. Later, she accumulated many records of dating.
If I were to ask a question to describe her, it would be like an open-book exam. She is in need of love. Her parents had little control over her, and she relied heavily on her grandmother who owned a canteen. Later, her parents got divorced, and she told her children about her affairs, which became a famous saying. She said she told her parents to either give me happiness or give me half a million to buy happiness.
A asked me to go to his studio to learn painting, and later L also went with A. L's painting was okay at first. She liked to polish the brush strokes in the painting very finely. Later, she spent more and more time outside with the male students who were fighting, and she stopped coming to the studio to paint. One day I became that so-called good kid again. She passed by the studio one day and came in to take a look. The teacher pointed at my paintings, complained that she didn't come to paint, and said look at what Shi Jiating had already painted.
A and I were cold to her for a while, and she would cause damage by knocking down our bicycles and the like. Her destruction is different from the ordinary destruction of a little boy, she is doing it to gain attention. Later, her methods became more and more extreme. One time, she buried several thumbtacks in A's car seat. Both A and I were very angry. At that time I felt that L liked A.
When I was in the second grade of junior high school, A might also like L, but I looked down on L very much at that time. I told A that I could get a girl like L in minutes. I wanted to express my contempt for L, but A thought I was provoking him and was very unhappy. So I was also very unhappy and proposed to bet him 20 yuan on whether I could fall in love with L. Later A found B to help him. A few days later, I found out that L had been fingered by B. A came to me and asked for twenty yuan, but I didn't give it to him and I didn't say anything. During that time he kept scolding me. Later, when I thought about this incident, I felt very painful. It was not the process of the painful event, but the painful way I did it.
L and I actually met once after a long time. I was in college at the time, and L also took the art college entrance examination and came to my university to take the art exam. She asked me on QQ if I could help her move her painting tools. After meeting, she has become very sociable and dressed up beautifully. I invited her to have a meal in the cafeteria at noon. She kept talking, so I responded to her. I remember that the only time she complimented me that day was when I asked for a cigarette and I gave her Yuxi. She was very surprised. In fact, I have been smoking very cheap cigarettes, and I just wanted to change my taste during those two days, so I bought a box of Yuxi.
I learned painting because when I was a child, I often went to artificial lakes to catch fish and shrimps. My parents were afraid that I would drown and did not have enough time to look after me. I happened to like painting, so they put me into a half-custody and half-painting tutoring class. The teacher was very amateur, so I went to his studio after being introduced by A.
The studio is opened by a father and son. The son is about thirty years old and his name is J. Both father and son like to paint traditional Chinese paintings, including tigers. Both father and son have very bad tempers. They often quarrel in the studio, and the volume is extremely high. It is said that the old man also has an ex-wife, with whom he has a son who is engaged in music and graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music. The old man also has a calligraphy and painting shop on the pedestrian street, selling calligraphy and painting, but he always helps his son teach. The old man is obviously a better teacher than his son. When I went there, it was around 2010, and the domestic art exam-oriented education was beginning to become deformed, and my son was obviously affected by those exam books. Of course, the education of Western painting in our country has a huge problem, which involves the artists who studied in the Soviet Union and France in the early years of our country. I will definitely not talk about it.
Not long after I came here, J was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts as a part-time graduate student. He worked very hard to market his identity as a graduate student at Central American Academy of Sciences. He added the words "Central American Academy of Sciences" in front of the door of his studio. He often showed his students photos of himself and his tutor. He often boasted about how great his tutor was. He felt that he had entered a "disciple" and that his fellow graduate students were his "senior brothers and sisters" and they all respected their mentor very much. What he said was quite in the style of the current "Central American School".
His famous saying is "Sail against the current, if you don't advance, you will retreat." He taught students that they must work hard to draw, work hard to climb up, and must work hard to gain more fame and fortune so that others can respect themselves.
My grades in junior high school were very good and I was admitted to the best high school in Tangshan. J wanted me to take the art high school entrance examination, but I didn't want to take it. Then J called my mother whenever he was free. My mother couldn't stand J annoying her, so she told me that I should take the exam, so I took the exam.
I returned home after the college entrance examination and painted a plaster statue in his studio for about two weeks. During this period, I also helped to educate his students. Before I went to college, he treated me to dinner and gave me five hundred yuan. Later, he wanted to open a college entrance examination studio and asked me to work with him. I refused because I felt that I couldn't get along with his personality. But he called me several times after that, saying that I was learning to paint when I was a child, and that he wanted me to do it with him, which made me very annoyed. I was embarrassed and turned him down a few more times.
The Self-Material Project is an exploration into the inner self, which includes cherishing and organizing personal memories, dreams and various life fragments. We hope that through this plan, we can build a shared collective subconscious with you, so that we can roam together in the infinite sea. This program encourages us to look back on our experiences and piece together fragmented memories and dreams into a meaningful story in order to better understand ourselves, our past and our future. By sharing and communicating these precious moments, we can create deeper connections and explore together the complexity and beauty of human life.
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